Please do not state that “This study was supported by U01 AG016976.” (This is acceptable ONLY if NACC supported your study directly by awarding you funds through a Junior Investigator or Collaborative Project grant.)

If you used data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Genetic Consortium (ADGC), please acknowledge that grant as well (NIA/NIH Grant U01 AG032984).

NACC recommends that you include the phrase, “This analysis used data from X ADCs,” consulting the NACCADC variable to determine how many ADCs are represented in your data set. (The NACCADC number varies from one data set to another because the number of ADCs has changed over time.)

NACC recommends that you describe the specific span of time that is represented by your data. This can be accomplished by using the start date of the UDS (September 2005) and the data freeze on which your analysis was based (e.g., “… for UDS visits conducted between September 2005 and May 2012”). Please note that any given data freeze contains data from the previous month and before, such that the June freeze contains data from May and before). Please refer to the email documentation that you received with your data set or contact a NACC consultant to confirm the data freeze used for your data set. If your data set includes MDS subjects, please be aware that these data were abstracted from medical records starting in 1984.

Cross-referencing the list of ongoing and completed projects

Visit the list of ongoing and completed research using NACC data on the Researchers website to be sure that your analysis does not repeat findings already published. NACC cannot ensure that each data request and resulting data set are novel to the NACC database. It is the responsibility of the researcher, not NACC, to identify a unique research hypothesis and ensure there is no significant overlap with other ongoing or published NACC data analyses.

Using appropriate methods based on the nature of NACC data

Please note that the NACC data are not appropriate for studying the incidence or prevalence of MCI/dementia at the population level (city, county, state, etc.) because of the varying sampling strategies at each Center.

If conducting survival analysis using NACC data, beware of common violations of model assumptions. For example, if a subject has become too impaired to continue follow-up, the reason for censoring may be closely related to the outcome. Please contact a NACC consultant with any questions about time-to-event analyses.

NACC data are not ideally suited to study risk factors for dementia because of varying methods of subject recruitment across Centers and because of largely incomplete exposure histories.

NACC consultants are happy to speak further with researchers about appropriate methodology. Please contact us at consnacc@uw.edu.

Ensuring proper submission to PubMed Central (PMC)

In order to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy, all authors using NACC data must ensure the proper submission of their published work to PubMed Central (PMC).